"You seen Elmo or Sascha around?" Brennan asked Tripod, after the crowd that'd been munching hot dogs and listening to the derelict had dispersed.

The joker shook his head. "They're gone, Mr. Y Ain't seen 'em, ain't heard of 'em all day."

Brennan sighed to himself. He knew, right away, that this was not going to be easy. He took two twenties out of his pocket and surreptitiously dropped them on the sidewalk.

Tripod's bare foot closed over them. His nimble toes picked them up and stuffed them in one of the pockets he'd sewn on the bottom of his pant leg.

"Keep an eye out for them. For anything about the killing. You can get in touch with me at the Victoria. I'm registered as Archer."

"Yessir." Tripod watched Brennan for a moment. "Good to see you again, Mr. Y"

"I wish I could say it was good to be back."

Tripod nodded once, then started down the street with his peculiar lurching gait. Brennan watched him go, then turned back to the Palace. The crowd of gawkers was still there. He wanted to get a good look at the crime scene, but now obviously wasn't the time for that. He'd come back when it was quiet and dark.

Now he had other avenues to explore. He wasn't convinced that Kien was actually behind Chrysalis's death, but it was as good a place as any to start his investigation. Kien, of course, wouldn't have done the killing himself, but the Shadow Fists had plenty of hired muscle capable of doing the job. Wyrm, for example, Kien's extraordinarily strong bodyguard, whom Brennan had witnessed threaten Chrysalis two Wild Card Days ago.

Of course, he'd been out of touch a long time. Things had probably changed, but there were people he could talk to, people who would be willing to pass on the latest information. Brennan hefted his bow case and started down the street.

The hunter had returned to the city.

Jube lived in the basement of a rooming house on Eldridge, in an apartment with bare brick walls and a lingering odor of rotting meat. His living room featured a lot of second-hand furniture and some kind of weird modern sculpture, an imposing floor-to-ceiling construct with angles out of Escher and a bowling ball at its center. Every now and then the bowling ball seemed to glow.

"I call it joker Lust," Jube told him. "You think that's strange looking, you ought to meet the girl who modeled for it. Don't look too long, it'll give you a headache. Want a drink?"

St. Elmo's fire flickered disturbingly across the surface of the construct. Jay sat down on the edge of the couch. "I'll take a scotch and soda," he said. "Go easy on the soda."

"All I've got is rum," Jube said, waddling into his kitchen. "Yum," Jay said, deadpan. "Sure."

Jube brought him a water tumbler half-full of dark rum, with a single ice cube floating on the surface. "The papers say it was the ace-of-spades killer," he said as he eased his bulk into a recliner, his own glass of rum in hand. His was decorated with a little paper parasol. "The Post and the Cry both."

"There was an ace of spades next to the body," Jay agreed, sipping his drink. "The cops don't buy it."

"How about you?"

He shrugged. "I don't know." He'd spent the last couple of hours reading the police file on the yahoo who signed himself "Yeoman." Now he wasn't sure what to think. "The M.O. is all wrong. Our friend likes to litter the landscape with corpses, but most of them have arrows sticking out of sensitive parts of their anatomy."

"I remember the papers used to call him the bow-andarrow killer, too," Jube said.

Jay nodded. "Not that he isn't flexible. If he can't put a razor-tipped broadhead through your eye, he'll strangle you with a bowstring or use an arrow with an explosive tip to blow you to hell. The cops have him down for one job with a knife and two with bare hands, but those have question marks next to them. Mostly he goes in for theme murders. He's got a real grudge against Orientals, too, judging from the number he's offed. But he's not fussy, he'll kill anyone in a pinch." Jay sighed. "The only problem is, Chrysalis was beaten to death by someone who was inhumanly strong, and our friend with the playing-card fetish is a nat."

"How can you be sure?" Jube asked.

"I took a crack at archery once," Jay said. "It's hard. You'd need to work at it for years to get good, and this psycho is a lot better than good. Why bother, if you're an ace?"

Jube plucked thoughtfully at one of his tusks. "Yeah," he said, "only…" The fat little joker hesitated.

"What?" Jay prompted.

"Well," Jube said reluctantly, "I think maybe Chrysalis was frightened of the guy."

"Tell me," Jay said.

"The last ace-of-spades murder was something like a year ago," Jube said. "Then they just stopped. It was about the same time that Chrysalis changed. I'm sure of it."

"Changed how?" Jay asked.

"It's hard to explain. She tried to act the same, but if you saw her every night like I did, you could see she wasn't. She was too… too interested, if you know what I mean. Before, when you came to her with some information to sell, she always acted a little bored, like she didn't care one way or the other, but this last year, it was like she didn't want to miss any little piece of information, no matter how trivial. And she was especially desperate for any kind of word on Yeoman. She offered to pay extra."

"Shit," Jay said. This put him back at square one.

"You couldn't exactly tell if she was frightened, not with Chrysalis," Jube said. "You know how she was. She always had to be in control. But Digger was jumpy enough for both of them."

"Digger?" Jay asked.

"Thomas Downs," Jube said. "That reporter from Aces magazine. Everyone calls him Digger. He's been hanging around the Crystal Palace ever since he and Chrysalis came back from that round-the-world tour last year. Two, three nights a week. He'd come in, she'd see him, and they'd go upstairs."

"Was he getting any?" Jay asked.

"He stayed past closing all the time," Jube said. "Maybe Elmo or Sascha could tell you if he was still there in the morning." He scratched at one of the stiff red bristles on the side of his head. "Elmo, anyway."

That comment struck Jay as odd. "Why not Sascha? He's the telepath. He'd know who she was fucking if anyone would."

"Sascha wasn't spending as much time around the Palace as he used to. He's been seeing this woman. A Haitian, I hear, lives down by the East River. Word is she's some kind of hooker. One of the roomers here, Reginald, works night security at a warehouse near there. He says Sascha comes and goes a lot. Sometimes he doesn't leave until dawn."

Not good," Jay said. He was starting to get an inkling of why Chrysalis thought she needed a bodyguard. Sascha had never been a major-league telepath, only a skimmer plucking random thoughts off the surface of a mind, but for years his abilities had sufficed to give Chrysalis early warning of any approaching trouble. But if Sascha had been spending a lot of nights out…"

"There's something else," Jube said. Thick blue-black fingers worried at a tusk again. 'About ten, eleven months ago, Chrysalis had a whole new security system installed.

"Cost a fortune, all state-of-the-art stuff. I know a man who works for the company that did the work. According to what I heard, Chrysalis wanted them to design-now get this-some kind of defense to kill anybody who tried to walk through her walls!"

Jay picked up the glass. The ice cube had melted. He didn't like the taste of rum anyway. He drained the glass in one long swallow, feeling more and more angry with himself. Yeoman had come in through the front door, that night at the Crystal Palace. None of them heard him enter, but when they looked up he was there. But his girlfriend, the sexy little blond bimbo in the black string bikini… she came in through a wall, stepping out of the mirror behind the bar, and ducking out the same way after Jay sent Yeoman off to play in traffic. "What's wrong?" Jube asked.